Upside down.

After working a full night and then some at the PD on Sunday, I hurried home, and changed clothes and went to the Fire Department. After doing a thorough vehicle check on a new piece of apparatus that we had just gotten second-hand from a larger department, I went to get my physical.

One of the reasons that I went to get my physical is because September is National Prostate Cancer Awareness Month, and it was time to see if my PSA had fluctuated at all. The last couple of years, my Prostate Specific Antigen has been so very low that the chances of me being one of the one in six men who develop prostate cancer are extremely low.  I get this every year. No, I've not had the digital-rectal exam in some time. Yes, the PSA test has a certain false result rate. But over the years, getting multiple negatives tends to show a trend line.  Get yourself checked, gentlemen. It was part of the same blood draw that they did for my overall workup. My insurance pays for the wellness check once a year for FREE, and that's not at all uncommon. One single stick in my left arm, and I get to find out all kinds of things about myself. You need to do this.  And you need to donate to the outstanding fundraising efforts being coordinated by my good friends for Kilted To Kick Cancer.

While at the doctor's office, I endured his very nice, but kind of embarrassing praise about my recent weight loss. I guess that 30 lbs is a lot to most people, but when you start at over 300 pounds, it's really just 10%.  My doc asked what I've been doing, and I shrugged and said that I've been moving around a little more, eating a little less, and I've cut carbohydrates in my diet. This last part makes me sad, because it's akin to scrubbing on a stain for 10 minutes, and realizing that you're actually making progress. Dang it-- I'm going to have to keep at it. :(

As you can see from my trend line on my geeky homemade spreadsheet, the progress is slow but sure.  But no one wants to read about someone's diet; I apologize.

I then took the Fire Chief's city truck in to get serviced, and found myself waiting in the lobby of the dealer maintenance department for 2 hours, realizing my blunder: I hadn't eaten all night and all morning, because I was NPO for the blood draw! Curses!  I stopped on the way back to the FD and ate heartily of sandwiches without their buns.

Getting to sleep after 3:00pm, I expected to get up and work on my EMT class online from about 11:00pm until 7:00am. I woke at 3:30am-- I had slept the clock around. I've not done that in a long time. But I'd been up for about 23 hours, too.

So it is that I'm now finishing my weekend kind of upside down. I got up this morning at about 1:30am, when I should have gotten up 10 hours or more before. Today is going to be rough at work.

_______________________

I just now was getting my workout gear together, for a half-hour workout before my wife and kids get up. The majority of my marriage, I've been on opposite shifts from my wife. I have learned how to gather clothes in the dark pretty well. By accident, I've learned the value of a blacklight flashlight.  It turns out that I can shine a pretty bright UV flashlight around the bedroom as I get my stuff together, and this doesn't bother my sleeping wife the same as even a weak white light would. The reflected UV light just doesn't seem to penetrate the eyelids. So now I've got one on my bedside table.

Thursday Pictures

The following two pencil sketches were done by my 10 year old daughter, to entertain her friend at school by putting moustaches on animals. The beret with the pencil moustache particularly cracked me up:

 I got a sample of a medication from the doc. It came in a 4" cube, which I opened to find the following:

On the wall at the doctor's office. I've never seen a "High Frequency Dessicator," before. I don't know what it does, even though I understand what dessication is.

This is 1.5 cubic yards of enriched soil, which I bought yesterday from the gettin' place, and put into my wife's raised beds. She's added a couple of beds this year, and also the ones from last year had settled a bit.

 

On Saturday, my wife suggested that we two spend 45 minutes clearing out some junk that had accumulated in the garage. 8 hours of sorting and cleaning later, we found that we had 5 well-stuffed, heavy Hefty Steel Sacks.





During the cleaning, I found this little dumplin', which I had gotten for my Honda Civic, years back. The Civic's A/C system will no longer take a compressor for less than the cost of the car, so I had promised this to my old patrol partner for his beater Honda, only to find that I couldn't find it for him. I was so excited to find this (I'd paid $130, 7 years ago for it), that I sent him a text.

I had my 10 year-old get up from whatever it was she was doing with the neighbor girl on the front porch, to do the dishes. They both sighed, as she laid down her pad to go do her chore. I looked at the pad, and saw that she'd just started a pretty decent life study on the neighbor kid. Seriously, based upon this if she had finished the facial features, I wouldn't have been able to post it here without the neighbor girl's parents' permission. I haven't seen the finished product.

Sadly, my camera phone doesn't have the light-gathering capability to take good night pictures, or you could appreciate the awesomeness of my 14 year old daughter's first-ever attempt at parallel parking. I credit good genes, and a decent driving instructor. (Yours truly.)

M19 Standing semi-supported (leaning back against my car) at 20 yards with .38 Specials (158g LRN), Single action. Shot from about 7:30 o'clock.

M19 fired off-hand double action at 25 yards. 158g factory Hydrashock .357 Magnums. (There are a couple of .22 holes in there, too.) Meh.

Coffee can with custom target made by daughter to shoot at with her new .22 WMRF rifle. (Depiction of "Kim KardASSian.")

Daughter's new custom .22 WMRF rifle.

Daughter during initial sight-in at ~20 (or just a bit less) yards.

50 yard sight-in.





Coffee. Make some.

The crucible of my coffee roaster broke.
We ran out of coffee.
Time to roast some.

Start with the stove-top popcorn popper. Turn on the vent-a-hood over your stove. Turn the fan to HIGH.

 Heat slowly. Crank that crank.

 Crank it.

 Really, you should probably not stop to photograph it. You'll burn some beans.You're hearing the beans popping now, as the chaff pops loose from the bean.

Darker. That's not poor focus; that's smoke coming off the beans. Crank it fast. Put down the damn camera! Cranking faster, you're knocking the hulls off the beans.

 At this point, dump the beans out into a colander.

Shake the beans to cool them, and loosen the chaff. Blow on them to blow away the loose bean hulls. Once they're cool, pour them into your burr grinder. Grind away some beans while you filter some water for your coffee maker. Make coffee right away.

Note: If your vent-a-hood isn't professional strength, you're probably going to want to cook this outside. It makes your house smell like there was a fire at the coffee roasting plant for a day or two afterward.

Battle of the 'bots.

You may recall a certain nifty washing machine that I geeked out over, a year or two ago. It does a GREAT job. It washes the heck outta my clothes, and centrifuges them dry enough that the dry cycle takes less time. It uses less soap. It just... it generally makes me happy.

But there are times when operator error in its use makes me unhappy.

Like, say, when I hurridly last night gathered up clothes for a wash and picked up my wife's jeans where she had shed them in the dark, and washed her iPhone.

It's a really clean paperweight, now. I've accepted that it will NEVER work again.

I just got off the phone the most Apple-icious guy I know. I have gone complete through denial, still feeling rage, sadness, and am going through my bargaining phase.

So, 18 year old phone. What's my best solution to get my wife back into a Genius Bar?

I am in soooo much trouble, right now.

I was just doing a little laundry in the dark.

Recovery Position.

I'm not a paramedic. I'm not even a first aid instructor. I'm just a guy who's arrived first on a few scenes, and who listened when he was given first-responder first aid classes.

You won't live long if you don't breathe. While the rescue breathing portion of CPR is more and more being left out of the protocol, you're the new protocol still facilitates breathing, by clearing the airway and doing compressions. Breathing is essential, and it's still, for the time being, letter "A" in your A-B-C priority list. (Of course, if there's heavy bleeding, you're going to have to skip down that list a bit. Life is dynamic, you know?)

I bring this basic fact up, because time and again, I arrive on a scene to see something like the following: Man on the floor, on his back, unconscious, vomiting. Towels have been placed around him by someone else to attempt to clean up the vomit. The worried family member who has let me in has asked for no sirens because it will disturb the neighbors/the kids/Sumdood. As I lean over to assess the guy to advise our medics of his condition, a spew of vomitis, or saliva, or blood, or a combination of the three, is coughed up at me. Marvelous.

If you find a person who is unconscious, and cannot be revived, you need to protect that airway. Unless you know that it will cause other more serious harm (like with crushed ribs and/or spinal injuries), get them into the Recovery Position, right quick.

Simply put, the Recovery Position gets the patient on his side, with bent knee and outstretched arm to prevent rolling back over. The mouth should be slightly down cast to let matter drain. The chin is up to open the epiglottis.

And that's it. If you're of similar size, getting a person into the recovery position takes about four seconds. If they're much larger than you, then you're going to have to think about how to use their limbs as lever arms to get them onto their sides. If you ABSOLUTELY CANNOT do it, then call for emergency assistance right away, explain that you can't move them, and then go monitor the patient's airway, keeping it clear. If they're pregnant women, turn them onto their left side to keep the uterus off of the vena cava.

Look, some people have survived seizures, heart attacks, strokes, drug or alcohol-induced comas, etc--- all to die from the complications (like pneumonia) from aspirating fluids. Help them out, please.

Have a plan. When the emergency arises, put it into action. You can do this.

Escort.

Tonight, I take my daughter and her two best friends out to dinner in the Big City of Fort Worth, TX. Well, it's awfully big, to us.

My daughter loves a restaurant there, and I'll be taking her there for her 12th birthday. She was allowed to invite her bestest friends. I'll be along to pay the check, and such. But basically, it's a first Girls' Night Out, for her. We'll walk the Stockyards or Sundance Square, or whatever.

I'm happy to blend in, and not make eye contact, as I'm sure she desires. Each girl carries a cell phone. I carry a cell phone and a gun or two.

On the way in, I think that I shall make clear my expectations about expected response to directions. My elder daughter knows them. But the other girls may not fully get that run, and get down mean exactly that. In my family, we also have a benign-sounding danger phrase, which I suppose that I will let them in on.

I, of all people, recognize that the world is actually a safer place than we give it credit for being, and I don't much think about these things, until I get put in charge of Other People's Children.

But when I take a group of kids downtown on a Friday night, I gird myself a bit tighter.

Power Tools

It's easy for me to quip about how we in the emergency response field are defeating natural selection, but the things aren't so jovial, when I park in someone's front yard and run past a girl that's crying because the paramedics are working on GramPaw, who just had a heart attack. As I came into the living room the other day, said grandfather wasn't looking good, as the EMT, who had just finished hooking up a five-lead monitor, began compressions. The paramedic calmly but efficiently began getting out his heart drugs. This looked like a dog and pony show for the family.

As I moved furniture to make access to get the guy out, I watched the paramedic get out a pretty nifty little red power drill. I'd never seen one, but my buddy Ambo Driver had told me about them before, so I recognized it for what it was: an intraosseous infusion power driver. He drove a trocar right into the patient's tibia. As he did so, I could hear the light little power driver motor bogging down as the threaded insert drew down tight to the patient's shin, enough to make the skin pucker just a bit. The paramedic then screwed in a line, and began squirting drugs into that line. Quite a lot of drugs. It hadn't struck me before how big a guy Gramps had been. Wow. More drugs?

They boarded him. C-collared him (why? WHY? He had a heart attack and fell to the floor. No evidence of neck trauma.), and then began to try to get him out of the house. two of us had the head, and the paramedic had his feet. Like many houses, this one was not designed to make it easy to get a gurney in or out of, so we brought he board out to the gurney. At the turn in the hallway, I just took the head, in time to realize that GramPaw had been a big ol' boy. We got him down the stairs, into the box, and I stood by with a deputy, trying not to look at the growing crowd of family members, crying and hugging each other, talking about GramPaw.

This man was loved. But I really didn't feel like GramPaw had a chance.

Later that night, the paramedic dropped by the P.D. GramPaw was stable when they left the hospital, and at last check had a room at the ICU.

A fire extinguisher in every lawn shed...

It's springtime, and my lawn has erupted with every kind of grass, weed, flower, bush, and vine. There are neat little rectangles of dark green where the rolling chicken coop has been and where I have spread rye/bluegrass/fescue blend seed behind. There's a fair bit of Bermuda, and more dallisgrass (a.k.a. crab grass) than I care to admit. Also, there are the nettles and dandelions.

When I was a little kid, I loved dandelions. Their flower was a happy yellow, and their puffballs were fun to blow. Now, as the guy who mows the lawn, their puffballs irritate me. They send up their puffballs the day after I mow, making my otherwise decently-trimmed lawn look raggedy. It's really quite amazing how fast they go up. And my mulching lawnmower does nothing to kill the seeds; it just plants them right there in a dense pattern.

I'm not much one for weed killing chemicals in my lawn. But I like fire.

Enter the Dragon. No, you Bruce Lee fans, not that silly movie-- I'm basically talking flame-thrower, here. The dragon is a nifty device that attaches to a standard 20 lb propane tank, and shoots out a 3 foot blue flame on demand. It's loud, and scares the neighbors. Fired at weeds, it fries them down to the roots, leaving nice ash to nourish the new grass seed that you then throw down. Organic as hell. Fun. Fire. What's not to like?

The kids, playing in the yard, each wanted a turn. And who am I to deny them this fun? They shot some undesireable plants, and went back to the trampoline. I kept at the weeds. While I went about the yard spraying blue flame at pesky weeds, I found a poison ivy vine growing up near the fence. I'm highly allergic, and my wife is allergic to everything, so I saw this as a nice time to really fry a dreaded enemy. I let it have it. I gave it an extra squirt of burning propane, just to make sure the roots didn't come back. I moved on to other parts of the yard.

About 20 minutes later, I found the garden hose stretched across the yard. I pulled it to the hydrant to be coiled, and found that it was just running. Well, that was odd. Why was it just running in the yard? I grumbled about wasted water and the kids, and moved on. Then I found what the hose had been watering: The fence. Seems that I had gotten a bit carried away, burning that poison ivy bush. The fence was wet and charred around a new hole at the base, next to the dead poison ivy bush.

I worried. Had my neighbor seen his fence burning, and run over to run the hose to put it out before passive-aggressively leaving it running as he stalked away? Oof. Not good for neighbor relations.

I went inside and polled the house. My wife assured me that she hadn't used the hose. My 11 year old daughter said that she had not used the hose. I found my younger daughter watching SpongeBob Squarepants, and asked her about the hose.

She gave me half her attention. "What? Used the hose? No." She went back to watching cartoons for a second before turning back to me. "Oh yeah. I forgot. I noticed that the fence was on fire, so I put it out. Did I forget to turn off the hose, Daddy?"

"Uh, yeah. Hey, kid-- good job on the fire-fighting, but you might tell your daddy when you've done so, you know?"

"Okay, Daddy," she said, and went back to watching SpongeBob and Patrick Starfish torture Squidward.

I'm proud of my just-turned-8-year-old little girl, but kind of amused at her nonchalance at her actions. This could have become a Big Deal. As it was, I just replaced two fence stakes the next day. Took me 10 minutes, tops.

David Benke.

When it is Go Time, you must have your decision made, already.

David Benke, a math teacher and track coach, had several points to his advantage yesterday when a crazy man* was shooting children at a Littleton high school: he could run, and he could think, and he had at some point made up his mind to do what needed doing. In this story at CNN, Mr. Benke mentions being conscious of how long it took the guy to rack a round in after each shot. He launched his 6'5" frame into the guy, disarmed him, and held him. Yeah, yeah, others helped, and that's good. But who shall bell the cat? Who's first?

Why, it's the person who already decided before it all came down. If you will keep it in your head that you are a sheepdog rather than a sheep, then you are a lot closer to winning than some might think, even when apparently "unarmed."

There are some things worse than dying. I'm glad that David Benke didn't get hurt, but he would still have been a role model if he hadn't been successful in his attempt to stop the attempted murderer.

You are the first responder. Act accordingly.
___________________________
*Whose name I'll not bother mentioning here. He gets no glamour from me.

Maybe he reads LawDog.

At the last Police Pistol Match put on by a local medium-sized P.D., Dad and I noticed that the rangmaster was efficiently replacing targets rapidly, using 3M spray adhesive , a method recently featured on LawDog's blog.

This stage was the accuracy portion, which was what kept me above the middle of the pack, as I was shooting my beloved Kimber 1911.

Hoka hey.

I'm going to die.


And so are you.

And so too will our children die.

From the moment that we leave our mothers' wombs, we are taking the long route to become worm poop.

Nobody gets out of this life alive. Nobody.

If you know in your heart that your religion or belief system has preserved your soul forever, then that's superb, and I know that you'll have plenty of peace of mind when you accept the fact that your body will fail, at some point in the future. You. Will. Be. Dead.

2,365,200,000 looks like a big number, until you realize that it accounts for the average number of seconds that the average man will live in this country. How are you enjoying each of those two-billion-some moments? Good? Constructively?

A second is about how long you will have, to take in what is going on, when the Crisis hits, and you have to start reacting. It may be the most important second of your life, and yet it costs the same as all the others. You got it for the price of your birth. How will you spend it?

In our most recent school shooting, a man entered the front of a lecture hall, and began shooting at students. Most of them died with shots to the head. Most of them, unable to run, hid under their desks. I can already picture how the headshots occured: in modern lecture halls, there's no protection from the desks, and the students pitched forward, trying to get closer the the floor. So the tops of their heads were presented to the shooter.

My good friend Tamara posted a thread a year or so ago called "Ain't Going Out Like That." Tamara has decided that she would rather fight and die or fight and win, than to give her life up to chance. Tamara carries a pistol or three wherever she goes. She has chosen.

Some young people have chosen to obtain a high powered, high dollar college education to propel their careers forward. At most major universities, carrying a firearm is not only cause for expulsion-- it's cause for indictment. These students want to finish with their class, and carrying a gun just doesn't really seem like a worth-while option. I can understand; I was one of those students, and still would be. Why risk your career?

So there you sit. Right with the law. Right with school policy. Your notebook is half-full, your pen is half-empty, and you're trying to pay attention to what that professor is saying, when in walks a Loser who is going to make everyone else pay for his inability to adjust. He has a gun, and you don't. He starts shooting. The aisles are full. The room is a death trap. There's no way out.

And there he is. Picking people off. Maybe you're next. Or maybe chance will smile on you. How many guns does he have? How many bullets? Maybe he has enough for all of you. This can't be allowed to continue.

It's time.

Time to decide-- are you going to dig down and hide among the fallen and hope that you live? Are you going to claw your way to an exit and leave the rest in the lecture hall? How are you going to live with yourself after that?

Planes have fallen from the sky.
Students and worshipers have died in their seats and in the aisles.
Hiding doesn't work.

Today is a good day to die.

If you must die, would you not rather die falling toward your killer, stopping your attack? If you're hit, don't you want to stop him?

Take him down. Yell "Get him!!!" and take him down.

Use books, book bags, fists, keys, knees, elbows, fingerclaws, pens, pencils... but take his ass down. And kill him.

There are worse ways to die, for you, than to die while doing this.

_ _ _

*I am now given to understand that "hokahey" was not Sioux for "today is a good day to die," but rather the Sioux warrior term for the equivalent to "let's roll." That's fine. Go with it.

Oh, come on!

My last Wikipedia safari reveals that the first director of MI6, who espoused the use of semen as a field-expedient invisible ink ("Every man carries his own stylo."), was named Mansfield Smith-Cumming.

What's the point?

Note: This is a post about guns, and gets very slightly technical. If you're bored to tears by such drivel, you are forewarned; come again and see what I've got tomorrow.
_ _ _

I recently had business at the house of another cop.

I was in uniform, and he asked me what happened to my 1911 pistol. I had to admit that I now work for a department that issues Glocks, and expects me to carry one on duty. I allowed that I was able to do decent work with one, just not the higher-end shooting that I had been doing with my personal 1911.

"Speaking of 1911s, you want to see what I just bought?" he asked me.

Aha! I could see that he was eager to show me, and hey-- I'm always up for some show-and-tell. "Sure," I said. "Let's see what new play-pretty you got." To be honest, I was kind of curious.

As he unloaded the pistol (I appreciated his attention to safety) which he had just retrieved from a back room, he said, "I'm actually quite proud of this one." He handed it to me with some reverence that made me want to wince; if I didn't like it, I was clearly going to have to fib about it, to avoid hurting his feelings.

I looked down in my hand at a Springfield Operator, a semi-custom out-of-the-box 1911 .45 acp. His had been customized some more, making it undoubtedly more than the MSRP of $1100.

The black "Armory Kote" finish was blacker than black, and seemed to repel dust. The stocks that he had on it were some kind of very hard, checked grey stocks that had a slight cut-out for the thumb to more easily access the magazine release. They felt good. The 20 lpi checking was on the back of the flat mainspring housing, and on the frontstap of the frame. It had medium-profile tritium sights that gave a good sight picture. It had a bump on the extended grip safety, and a short hammer spur. It had an extended safety, which the ball of my overly-long thumb found easily. It had slide serrations on the front as well as the back.

I could deal with all of this, just fine. Actually, I liked it.

But.

It had a magazine funnel. These were originally popularized during the bastardization of IPSC, by making magazine changes faster. They allow the opening in the bottom of your magazine well of the pistol larger, thus making it easier to hit with blinding speed with the full magazine that you are inserting. There are problems, however:

1. To work (with blinding speed, or with any speed at all), the magazine must be longer than the standard 7 round magazine introduced 97 years ago. The standard method of doing this is to attach a "bump" or buffer pad to the bottom of a 7 or 8 round magazine, to extend its length. If you have a standard-length magazine designed to fit flush against the bottom of a standard 1911 pistol, you're going to have to press it in with the tippy-tip of your off-side thumb. Which is not fast.
2. This extends the length and bulk of your pistol, right where it sticks out from your body. Range shooters love this-- it absolutely can make the pistol easier to shoot. People carrying pistols begin to realize that they hit doorframes and such. They also become much more difficult to carry concealed.
3. It's one more part hanging off your gun.
4. It makes disassembly slightly more complicated.

Ambidextrous safety. I'm more amenable to them than some, because my mom's a lefty and her 1911 always had a Swenson ambi safety-- I thus grew up with an ambi-safety'd gun in the house, and shot one a lot. But if you're right-handed anyway, why hang more crap off your gun? Especially with the right side (for left-handed persons) safety also being oversized and extended? This can interfere with some holsters, and generally makes things bigger and less likely to go bang.

Flat mainspring housing, long aluminum trigger. One, or the other; either your hand is big, or your hand is small. Why increase the trigger pull with the longer trigger, but put a thin flat main spring housing in? I have big hands, and like an arched main spring housing a la the 1911A1.

Light rail. I can take 'em or leave 'em. I don't like that my boned holsters might not work with 'em, and I don't like that some people will rely on weapon-mounted lights to investigate sounds in the dark. Shining your weapon-mounted light into an unknown corner means that you're pointing your weapon at a previously unknown corner. No bueno. That said, they're great for dealing with known threats, in conjunction with dedicated lights. Training is needed, and the right mindset. I'll call that one a wash. (But damn, they're ugly.)

Rear sight raked back at a sharp angle, from the front. I suppose that this is to allow easy re-holstering. But they also disallow one-handed racking of the slide on jeans or table-edges.

Mediocre trigger. For better than a grand, I want that trigger to give me a surprise break, no creep, and a minimum of over-travel. I got none of this, on about a ~5 pound trigger. Not bad, mind you-- just not anything special. Come on, folks-- it's a single action pistol that's supposed to be an elite combat gun-- gimme a really good trigger.

Finally, it had the deal-breaker: A Full Length Guide Rod. It is this piece of metal for which I have entitled this blog entry. I ask, without a hint of snark in my voice: What is the point of the FLGR?

See here a picture of a field-stripped 1911 pistol (made by Colt) that I found somewhere in the public realm. You see that stubby tube of metal stuck in the right side of the recoil spring? That is the standard, and proper guide rod for the Model 1911 pistol, as John Moses Browning designed it. Its purpose is to give the end of the recoil spring an interface to press its force against the pistol's frame, as the recoil spring begins stacking its load against the slide as the slide moves rearward with respect to the frame. The entirety of the spring is enclosed within the dustcover of the frame and the front of the slide.

A Full Length Guide Rod is, relative to the pistol, a fairly new addition to the M1911. It replaces the standard length guide rod, and runs down the length of the spring, keeping it really, really straight. It is approximately the same length of the barrel, and when the slide is pulled back, it protrudes out beneath the barrel of the 1911, like this, or like this.

To accomodate this, a FLGR must have a special bushing (red) that allows it to protrude out the front, replacing the proper recoil spring plug that John Moses Browning designed almost a century ago. In some instances, the FLGR uses a hex-head (purple) to be unscrewed to take it out. That's what my friend's used.

This requires extra tools to disassemble the M1911 pistol. That's a shame, because the 1911 pistol is actually quite easy to field strip, as demonstrated to me regularly by my 9 year old daughter, who only requires a pencil or a pen (to remove the firing pen retention plate). (Teaser: we're working on her times, and will soon present high speed demonstrations, as soon as I figure out how to make video work.)

It also makes it more likely to break down, by increasing the number of bearing surfaces and parts. Also of interest: In a pinch, an empty .45acp case can be used to replace a missing recoil spring plug. (How could one of those go missing? Well, when the pistol is disassembled, the recoil spring is under some pressure. Things can sometimes get launched.) But if you're sporting a FLGR, you cannot utilize such field expedients.

Speaking of field expedients, in the case of a combat-worthy pistol, one might want to plan for the exigency of racking the pistol, one-handed. With an original-designed 1911 pistol complete with a standard-length guide rod, one need only to press the bottom of the slide (where the recoil spring plug is) against a hard edge, like table top or a door frame, to rack the pistol. With a FLGR in place, this is not very possible. Also, "press checks," wherein one pushes back on the slide slightly to assure that a round is in the chamber, are harder to accomplish with the FLGR in place.

Full-length guide rods don't only require more tools, they require more skill to break down.

So what's the point of the FLGR?

I've been told that they reduce the likelihood of the recoil spring "kinking". I have asked around among my gun afficianado friends, and I can't find any of 'em that have ever seen a "kinked" recoil spring, except for out of a pistol that blew up from a double-charged reloaded case (in which case, the pistol was ruined). I've been told that they somehow "buffer" the pistol. (By friction?) I've been told that they improve the accuracy of the pistol. I think that this is the one that really sells to most people. With a FLGR in place, the pistol feels tighter. It seems to rattle less between shots. There is a perception that the FLGR makes the gun shoot tighter.

A false perception.

When I got my brand new Kimber Stainless Classic 1911 (Series I. Seriously: they were made a lot better back then.), I took it out, and fired a couple of groups off of a sandbag rest at 25 yards with the factory FLGR in place. I then took the factory FLGR out and replaced it with a standard-length guide rod, and a standard recoil spring plug. I fired several more groups out of it, and found that they were precisely the same as the previous groups. Not "about the same." Not even better. Just, exactly, precisely, not-even-a-little-bit-different, The Same. I never put the FLGR back in.

The only possible benefit that I can possibly see to having a FLGR in place is that it adds a minute amount of weight to the muzzle, to assist in reducing muzzle flip during recoil. To that end, why not get tungston ones?

So why are they so prevalent among custom pistols? Even gun-smart men and women whom I respect are often carrying them. Why? Replacing the "custom," hard-to-use and hard-to-disassemble Full Length Guide Rods requires only that the guide rod and the spring plug be replaced. These are some of the cheapest parts for a 1911, and do not require hand-fitting. The cost should run less than $10 to replace them with old GI gun parts. (Which is what I have in my go-to gun.) Once disassembled, a nine-year old girl can put them in, without hesitation, the first time she tries. (I see her do it all the time.)

_ _ _

I commented on the parts of the gun that I liked, and I asked him about why he kept the FLGR for a duty gun. I just couldn't help it. He blinked, and said that he hadn't thought to do otherwise. I offered to show him the difference sometime. I hope he takes me up on it.

Cooking makes you cold.

I'm chilly.

I'm chilly because it's 33 degrees out despite the 11 mph wind from the SSE, and I got home hungry.

I saw a bowl of red new potatoes on the counter, and thought I'd just bake a few right up in the microwave.

Now, a couple of Christmases back, Holly's mom gave us this really cool baked potato thing that was basically a double thick cloth back that you could fit about three bakers in, fold it over, and bake them in the microwave, and they come out incredible. They cook faster, and they come out fluffier. Damndest thing I ever saw. Something about retaining just enough of the steam that boils out of them to help properly bake them.

Or whatever.

Anyway, I wanted the thing.

And it was in the laundry hamper, right on a pile of my daughters' and my own occassionally skid-marked undies and dirty socks. I ain't cookin' potatoes in that, 'til it gets a goodly cycle in the Whirlpool on Hot.

Well, hell-- what's an oven mitt but some quilted cloth, kinda like that potato-cooking bag?

So I sat 5 new potatoes on one oven mitt, and covered them with the other. I didn't want to put them in the oven mitt, because... Um, I just didn't. Hell, I don't know why.

And I set my 'wave for 5 minutes and some, and sat down to surf.

The 'taters finished by evidence of the ding, and I smelled something kinda pungent. Hm. Musta been something on one of the oven mitts, that heated up. I kept surfing. Ten minutes later, it seemed worse.

I opened up the microwave, and got my potatoes from two smoking oven mitts. Actually, the proper word is "smoldering." Opening the microwave made one of them go into a low flame. After a visit to Mr Sink for some expedient fire extinguishment, I realized that we were soon to be hearing from Mr. Fire Alarm, damned quick, if I didn't do something. As it was about 1 AM, that would mean that I would be visited by Faces Like Walnuts, and Mrs. Bitchy-Pants.

I got to work.

Front Door: Flung open.
Back Door: Flung open.
Bathroom stink fans: On.
Ceiling fans: Turned on to Warp-Factor-4-Mr.Sulu, Scotty-can't-you-get-me-more-power?.

Took about 10 minutes of that fresh breeze blowing through to get the stench out.

The potatoes were just right, though.

No blog for you today-- come back tomorrow.

I'm currently enjoying my "lunch break" [Blue Diamond Bold Jalepeno Smokehouse Almonds (So good) and a Diet Coke], before getting back to my research proposal: "To Study The Effect of College Education On the Effectiveness of Law Enforcement Officers." Or somesuch-- it's a working title.

Since I'm working at the computer lab all night (morning now), and since they won't let me drink a Coke in the lab, I'm standing out in hallway at a kiosk provided for this very purpose.

And now my Coke is done.

Back to work.

Making do

Had last night off.

Got up early this morning, and got the kids and wife ready for work and school, and got 'em out the door.

Called to make sure Dad was still coming over at 0900 to pick me up to go to the P.D. pistol match, only to find out that he was still asleep (oops.).

Went to get another cuppa coffee. . . dregs only. No problem, I thought, I'll just make another pot, and offer Dad a cup when he gets here.

Only. . . we're out of coffee filters.

Go to Backup Filters... gone! Oh, hateful move! Why hast thou deprived me of life's necessities?!?

Well, no big deal. The beauty of a conical filter pot is that a field expedient filter may be devised with a single paper towel, by folding it into a quarter, then pulling it open so that it's triple layer on one side, single on the other.

Um.

No paper towels.

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Desperate. Measures.

Water drips through a coffee filter at 190 to 200 degrees Fahrenheit... which probably will kill whatever had grown on the used coffee filter that I'd thrown into my trash two hours before.

Maybe it's time to face the fact that I have an addiction.

OK. Here goes.

My name is Matt, and I am a coffee addict.

And I'm fine with that.

Now can you pick up a pack of #4 conical filters and a pound of coffee on your way back home? That'd be great, thanks.